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Posted: April 23, 2008

Burrill & Company Report Finds Personalized Medicine is Having a Dramatic Effect on Healthcare Delivery

(Nanowerk News) The convergence of genomics, information technology, and nanotechnologies will radically alter every aspect of the healthcare system from the way companies develop and market drugs to the way individuals pay for and receive medical services, according to Biotech 2008—Life Sciences: A 20/20 Vision for 2020 —the 22nd annual report on the biotechnology industry from Burrill & Company.

The just released publication examines the yearly performance of the biotech industry, makes predictions for the upcoming year, and provides insight how scientific, business and policy developments today will alter the healthcare landscape in 2020. One of the important accelerating trends reshaping the biotechnology industry is the emergence of personalized medicine.

Three years ago, we highlighted the fact that systems biology was beginning to move us to a more personalized medicine world that inevitably would lead us down the path to predictability and then on to prevention, said Mr. G. Steven Burrill, CEO of Burrill & Company.

The industry has been slow to adapt to the reality that the personalized medicine world is upon us. When we reach the year 2020, we will look back and note that 2007 was the year that personalized medicine started to play a role in every aspect of the healthcare continuum, said G. Steven Burrill, author of Biotech 2008 and CEO of Burrill & Company It’s critical that the industry starts to adjust to these changes now in order to be successful in this new world.

The book predicts that by 2020:

Wal-Mart, plus other direct to consumer healthcare delivery institutions, will become the place to go for medical treatment;

To be successful, companies will have to retool from being full-integrated to a virtually-integrated model;

People will be able to purchase organs off-the-shelf or even grow their own;

Our ability to design and test new drugs using computer simulations (in silico), as well as new capabilities to test for harmful side effects on model systems assembled on computer chips (lab-on-a-chip) will continue to improve;

Implants and prostheses that mimic biological functions, restore critical functions to existing organs or tissues, or even augment those functions will begin to appear.

Biotech 2008—Life Sciences: A 20/20 Vision to 2020 also highlights the developments in 2007 across all sectors including human healthcare, biofuels, agbio, and industrial biotechnology.

Biotech 2008 found that the biotech industry finished 2007 in good shape with a strong performance on the capital markets, which remained unpredictable all year long. The year saw 28 new biotech IPOs; financings and partnering deals collectively raising almost $45 billion for US companies. Although the industry had no difficulty raising money it had a tough time bringing new medicines to market with the prevailing safety-conscious attitude at the FDA taking its toll on new drug approvals.